Bright lights illuminate the large dark room, flashing in time to a song that builds towards a heavy crescendo while a man on stage roars into the microphone.
“Forget everything else aside from this moment,” he calls to the crowd, which moves together in a sweaty, passionate mess. “You were meant to be right here, right now”. His words are steady and sure yet drip with an unhinged zeal that stirs us further into a frenzy.
Some people are giddy with laughter, others brush away tears, but all have their gaze fixed on this god-like figure striding around the stage.
It’s the most moving group fitness class I’ve ever been to. Wait, no, it was a mega-church service. Or... hang on, I think it was a music concert.
That one could have such a spiritually charged experience in all these environments was an idea explored in two books I recently read in quick succession: Cultish by linguist Amanda Montell and Strange Rites by journalist Tara Isabella Burton.
Brilliant novels that prompted a sudden, intense fascination with the ironic way contemporary Western society denounces traditional religion’s rigidity and discipline more openly than ever, whilst demonstrating a devotion and worship unparalleled by previous generations. Their gods and rituals simply look a little different.
I first encountered this concept a few years back while reading David Foster Wallace’s commencement-speech-turned-novel “This is Water”.
In it, Foster says: “There is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
As a kid raised with a religious faith, Wallace’s words were deeply comforting. Growing up, peers and popular media made it clear my devotion (to Sunday church or bible reading) was unusual, a departure from the norm.
Yet, as Foster (and later, Morell and Burton) explain; no one is free from the human instinct to worship. It’s just that now, we can choose gods that aren’t so obviously religious.
Rise of the ‘Remixed’
The freedom to choose our gods, as Burton writes in her 2020 novel Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, is a relatively recent development. One that occurred around the 1950s when institutional religions started losing power; replaced by consumer capitalism and spiritual-but-not-religious communities and rituals.
Replaced because, according to Burton, people still “hunger for the same things human beings have always longed for: a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning, a community to share that experience with”.
It’s just, instead of acquiring these things from one set religion (typically inherited from your family or country), the ever-growing ‘Remixed’ as Burton calls them, prefer to pick elements from various spiritual, religious, philosophical and aesthetic systems that best reflect the person they are or wish to be. With the freedom to change whenever they please, of course.
The result, Burton explains, and Foster Wallace hinted at, is a society that may lack obvious capital-G-Gods but is no less dedicated to creating and worshipping something with fellow believers.
Wait, what is a religion?
Burton describes ‘Remixed’ as those who identify as “spiritual but not religious”. A distinction that begs a wider (and long-contested) question: what is a religion?
Is it an identity, (a box to tick and way to introduce ourselves), or a set of rituals and practices, like Sunday church services or fasting during Ramadan? Is it an ideology, a set of beliefs and rules we use to understand the world and how to act in it, or a community, the people who gather around these ideas or practices?
Social Glue
Ask sociologist Emile Durkheim (the so-called founder of the sociology of religion) and he would say the latter. In fact, in his 1911 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim claims a religion’s content (the beliefs or narratives) is irrelevant compared to the way they hold a society together.
“The god of the clan can be none other than the clan itself,” he writes, suggesting a religion’s driving force is not beliefs or rituals but the positive emotions and deep relationships that result from affirming and adhering to these things in symbolically significant ways with other people.
If viewed through this Durkheimian lens, one doesn’t need to search long to find a ‘church’ outside a traditionally religious building, Burton notes.
“You can find it in the exuberant joy fans experience at a Jonas Brothers concert, or in the intense in-group identity formation you find at a Super Bowl game, or, in its darkest iterations, at a Hitler Youth march.”
The form doesn’t matter, she adds, as long as participants have a shared symbolic object to worship and rituals or routines to strengthen social bonds around said object.
Meaningful Narrative
Other scholars disagree and say religion isn’t just social glue but a way to answer the question of ‘what it all means’.
In The Sacred Canopy (1967), renowned sociologist and theologian Peter Berger says humans "are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order on reality” as a way to cope with the presence of evil, suffering and meaningless.
Religion, he claims, is one such coping mechanism that offers an ordered picture of the world and how one must behave in it. Not only does this satisfy the “human craving for meaning” he writes, but provides a “shield against terror”.
Why the shift away from religion?
However, today we’re finding this ‘shield’ in new and different places. Institutional religion is rejected in favour of intuitional spirituality.
This shift is largely the fault of institutions themselves, Burton suggests, as traditional religions and social structures have been unwilling (or unable) to adapt and evolve culturally and sometimes just functionally, to maintain motivating purposes, strong communities and a compelling view of the world.
Although, it’s not entirely their fault. When consumer capitalism emerged in the 1950s, people moved en mass to urban centres, and the social and geographic pressures that previously pushed people towards centralised religions, collapsed.
For the first time ever, you could choose the career, lifestyle, community and faith you wanted rather than inherit it from your family or town. In recent decades, internet connectivity has only increased this ability to connect across geographic divides.
Now, make no mistake, these people still deeply desired the comforting sense of meaning, strong community and challenging disciplines religions provided. They just also wanted “the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems,” as Burton put it.
The Rise of Corporate Religions
It’s little surprise corporations saw the gap and quickly created (and more importantly, monetized) “institutions, activities, philosophies, and rituals that manage to be challenging and totalizing while also preserving millennials' need for individualization and personal, intuitional freedom”.
It’s the cult fitness classes (Peleton, F45 and CrossFit to name a few) and fanatic music communities (a la Taylor’s ‘Swifties’ or Harry Styles’ ‘Harries’), world-famous beauty brands (Fenty, Glossier or Mecca) or all-consuming work philosophies at companies like Google, Meta or Apple.
All of which appear secular or unspiritual but involve enchanting narratives, exacting rules and compelling purposes that match if not supersede traditional religions.
Few movements exemplify this better than the toxin-fearing, exercise-loving, paranoid and cultish phenomenon known as ‘wellness’.
The worship of wellness
On the surface, contemporary wellness culture seems superficial; nothing more than an attentiveness towards physical and mental health in order to live your best life.
It’s only after scratching at the mindfulness apps or meal plans one sees subtle stories about good and evil, rituals to perform in community and authority figures who lead the way. In other words, something that looks a lot like a religion writes Burton.
Instead of pastors or priests, one follows influencers or entrepreneurs who don’t preach from pulpits or temples but from social media accounts, conferences, podcasts and books. People like Jordan Peterson, Kayla Itsines or Jay Shetty who, like religious leaders through the ages, show and tell us how to achieve a meaningful and happy life. As Montell points out in Cultish, they’ll even borrow explicitly religious language; a change is a ‘transformation’, certain foods are ‘pure/whole’, activities are ‘disciplines’ and we as people must ‘cleanse’ and ‘detox’ as we are inherently ‘sacred’.
Like any good religion, Wellness also has a fight against evil, only in this instance, it’s called ‘toxicity’. A quality found in Big Pharma and processed foods, capitalism and even other people, who become toxic if they hinder our freedom or journey towards self-improvement.
A pursuit that isn’t just positioned as a goal but an ethical duty, writes Burton.
“We have not merely the inalienable right but the moral responsibility to take care of ourselves first before directing any attention to others,” she says of Wellness ideology.
“We have to listen to ourselves, to behave authentically, in tune with what our intuition dictates.”
From New Age to Wellness
This specific combination of suspicion towards institutional authority and aggressive individualism isn’t new. Rather, it’s the latest iteration of the New Age movement. After taking off in the 1960s, the ideology has proved near impossible to define, operating more like a junk drawer of esoteric and occult spiritual traditions.
Those who follow it can pursue anything from meditation or yoga to UFO chasing, crystal healing or creative visualisation. Although, all appear to share a fundamental focus on humans (and often, the individual in particular) as a powerful engine for major, universal change.
Today, Wellness is arguably the most commercially successful denomination of New Age, and hovers at a net worth of around NZ$7 billion per year (for perspective, this is half the size of the global healthcare market). Practices that were considered fringe a few decades ago, such as alternative medicine, meditation, veganism or manifestation have become commonplace in popular culture.
Part of this is due to the West's (and especially America’s) Protestant history, Montell writes in Cultish. A history that framed hard work and self-improvement as the path to holiness. So, when Wellness came along and promised people could strive and achieve ‘the good life’ without dogma or dated rituals, they were primed to sign up.
To clarify, this doesn’t make cycle studios or band fandoms, diet groups or corporate businesses inherently bad. But it can make them powerful in a way they don’t typically own up to.
Spend enough time at my church and you’ll eventually be invited to give your whole life, every little bit, to Jesus; to learn what he taught and try to love people how he loved them. Say what you will about Christianity (and yes, a lot can be said) but in my experience, it’s pretty upfront about what will be asked of you and how it will influence/shape/change you. It owns its religiosity.
And just because Instagram influencers or fashion brands, yoga studios or work environments lack the ancient cathedrals, holy books or tick box on the census, it doesn’t mean they don’t also demand time, money, attention and devotion in service to a grand narrative about the world or in return for the promise for becoming someone new.
Because, as Burton points out: “We do not live in a godless world, rather, we live in a profoundly anti-institutional one.”
It’s this guise of godlessness or ideological neutrality that should prompt us to look critically of the communities, products or systems we’re involved in, writes Wallace, especially if they promote the single-minded, embodied pursuit of power, beauty, money, intellect or objects. Directions of worship we “gradually slip into, day after day” simply by getting a little more selective about what we watch, who we spend time with or how we measure value.
In most cases, never “fully aware that that’s what you’re doing”.
The advantage of awareness
This awareness is what matters, I think.
Because it would be considered absurd for someone to attend a church every Sunday, practise the rituals, listen to the preaching and spend time with the community and never seek to understand its ideology; what it considers ‘the good life’, how it wants members to be transformed and what sacrifices that transformation will require.
Yet I can go to Les Mills five times a week, and perform synchronised movements with a crowd of people while instructors repeat seemingly secular messages (which are, upon reflection, rooted in New Age ideology) without ever asking the same questions.
Simply put, the friendships and habits you form, what you spend money and time on and topics that hold real estate in your mind and conversation, shape your character. In the words of author James K.A. Smith in his novel You Are What You Love: These tangible, visceral, repeated practices carry a story about human flourishing that we learn in unconscious ways.”
It’s worth taking the time to see what liturgies are hidden within your everyday schedule to see what direction that is.
Now, if you’re David Foster Wallace, awareness isn’t enough. Some gods are simply insatiable to the point of self-destruction.
To continue to quote we started with, he says: “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles-- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”
If you spend your life chasing money and things, he explains, you will never have enough. A claim that brings to mind what John D Rockefeller said when a reporter asked him how much money was ‘enough’ when he was at the peak of his wealth: ‘Just a little bit more’.
Make your body and beauty your god, Wallace continues, you’ll always feel ugly and “die a million deaths” as you age.
His point being that internal desires are hedonistic treadmills no amount of striving will ever *quite* satisfy.
Freedom: The Catch-22
Burton also criticises the ‘Remixed’s’ approach to religion but for more structural reasons.
For many Remixed, freedom is the quality that draws them from organised religion towards a looser, more diverse spirituality. But this quality may also be its biggest flaw.
Brazenly free from rules or restrictions, intuitional religions (religions of the self as Burton describes them) encourage people to freely pursue their desires, as long as they don’t harm others. A call that sounds great but results in a whole lot of people united only by their shared desire to attain individual fulfilment and authenticity, which, as one can imagine, doesn’t exactly prompt compromise or selfless commitment – qualities often required to form coherent ideological systems or strong-group communities.
Instead, the result is an ever-growing number of increasingly weak subcultures, personal practices and cult fads whose membership and ideology kaleidoscopically changes.
If this sounds like a chaotic system to draw identity, community and meaning from, well, that’s your judgement to make.
But I think it does illustrate how, despite intuitive religions and institutional religions appear to sit on opposite ends, they both come with a cost. It’s just that today, you can choose which one you want to pay.